Around the turn of the 2010s, so not too many years ago but 2 or 3 paradigm shifts in “what the internet means for sex work”, the big thing was escort review sites. “The Erotic Review” nationwide, but also RedBook, particularly in San Francisco, an epicenter with its openminded Internet-forward rich male techie workforce.

This advantaged the clients (they preferred “hobbyists”) who were able to raise standards and institute the “RBGFE” as the norm, which if I remember was 1hr DFK, BBBJ, CFS, DATY, MSOG for $200.

(That’s “RedBook Girlfriend Experience”, with Deep French Kissing, Bareback Blowjob, Covered Full Service, Dining at the Y [cunnilingus] and Multiple Shots on Goal [sessions not concluded upon first orgasm])

And the providers were this bottomless pool of Korean AAMPs (Apartment Asian Massage Parlors) in the big apartment buildings on the edge of the valley, packs of 4 or 5 girls living on 2-year rotations in one apartment and sharing another as a workspace.

And the story put out was that for generations, poor rural Korean girls had gone to the cities to build a nest-egg in the hot-sheets trade and then returned to the village to start their real lives, and this was a continuation of that, especially now Korea is connected enough what happens in the city isn’t guaranteed to stay in the city.

The point of the story was that no, these girls hadn’t been lured by false promises of tourist jobs, they knew what they were getting into all along. Notions of “sex trafficking” have metastasized* and valid consent narrowed since then, but at the time if you were okay with escorts in the first place that was sufficiently kosher.

* this would be, to my count the third major national “sex trafficking” panic in America (previous ones called it “white slavery”), the Mann Act came out of one of the first two. After-the-fact investigation showed they were in reaction to no particular “crisis”, the world’s oldest profession chugging along as always. Which, pace centuries-old English folk songs, includes young women sweet-talked and seduced by pimps who take them to the city and turn them out.

And now I’m realizing that that “village-girl tradition” is basically continuous with an American military brothel system under a right-wing dictatorship that forced-marched the population to industrial capitalist urbanity (the “Miracle on the Han River”), rural people’s movements having been suppressed in the extremely bloody Korean War.

And that is in turn basically continuous with the same pimps and comprador elites under Japanese occupation and the same system

Like, on the Japanese side, okay there’s a lot of unreconstructed nationalist foof, but the more coherent pushback is “there were no slave raids, it’s just that occupation a/o colonialism rendered rural subsistence agriculture unsurvivable, as thousands of years experience tells, prostitution will follow, we organized it by best practices”.

And that the only reason they’re even asked to indulge the Koreans is because they have to share an alliance structure that’s basically the American continuation of the old European empires, and there’s nothing it can coherently damn them for without first damning itself ten times over